I have two miners now, each with the a separate payout address. I see the correct hash rate and I see the shares growing on both units. I have been through 4 rounds now and still the unpaid balance is zero. I was expecting the unpaid balance to tick up at least at the end of each round. What am I doing wrong or what am I missing?

As mentioned, this is a cgminer issue. I'm trying to baby cgminer by changing pool side behavior to work around its bugs. There's only so much I can do, especially since I dont have a KnC unit myself to dev with.

Edit: I quickly hacked in a notice on the stats to detect when fail-safes happen and put a notice on every page. Hopefully this helps with tons of inquiries every time this happens.

What does this mean though? What are the conditions for a fail-safe mode? Since this is the first time I encountered this, I assume this is not "normal".

it is normal, and alotta things trigger failsafe...no biggie if it happens thou, it happens to protect everything but wizkid is trying his best to make sure it doesn't happen alot...I'm sure someday he'll get the ship sailing nice and smooth

Did some more testing today with KnC miners... I'm pretty much giving up on cgminer and its bugs.

Basically the results of my testing are: anyone running a KnC device on any pool is losing at least 10 to 20 Gh per Jupiter device due to false HW errors.

I'm pretty much done debugging this issue for now, since I don't want to hassle more people for remote access. I'll happily work with KnC on the issue however, and have proposed this to them.

Long story short, this isn't a pool issue. It is a cgminer issue which seems to be related to the KnC driver code. Specifically, it sometimes mixes up work and return nonces when rechecking work, resulting in false hardware errors.

On the other hand, I've tested November jupiters with bfgminer and have gotten as low as 0.4% HW errors on the Eligius main servers after 15 minutes. Similar results on other pools as well.

So, if you value your hashes, I suggest ditching cgminer and using bfgminer, at the very least until there is a fix for the cgminer issue. Again, this isn't just a problem with Eligius. By using cgminer with KnC devices right now you are losing hashes on all pools due to false hardware errors.